The Role: 

The Head of Content Acquisition will lead the team responsible for shaping the future direction of Newsela’s content offerings, enabling Newsela to adapt to shifting business and market needs. To build a comprehensive pool of licensable content, your team will identify, analyze, and execute the acquisition of new content partners (e.g. NY Times, Players’ Tribune), content formats (e.g. videos, novels), and content direction/strategy (e.g. new revenue models, market opportunities). Reporting to the Chief Content Officer, you will set the vision and strategy for this team, and help shape the future of Newsela’s content library. You will also work closely with our Product, Editorial, Operations, Instructional Content, Customer, and Data teams to produce holistic recommendations and secure company-wide buy-in. 

Why You’ll Love This Role: 

Newsela is undergoing a fundamental shift in our user value proposition, moving from being a supplemental resource to a comprehensive curriculum replacement. That shift is largely a content-product shift, which the Director of Content Acquisition will deeply inform. The problems you will tackle from one quarter to the next will vary greatly, with the one common thread being that your focus will constantly be on whatever is going to produce the highest impact on our students, teachers, administrators, and company. You will oversee three unique, yet thematically similar, functions of content acquisition, partner management, and business strategy. 

Why We’ll Love You:

You have 8+ years of experience in strategic business development or partnerships, and have successfully built and execute roadmaps that drive business objectives for media or content-oriented companies. You have used both quantitative and qualitative methods to draw clear and actionable insights that have shifted an organization’s high level direction. Additionally, you have 3+ years of people management experience, overseeing ambitious, career-driven individuals. Your work has lived at the crossroads of various functions, and you’ve honed fluency in languages of sales, content, product, partnerships, and data.

About Newsela: 

Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that combines engaging, leveled content with integrated formative assessments and insights to supercharge engagement and learning in every subject. Students and teachers use Newsela to find digital content from 100+ of the best sources—from National Geographic to NASA, Biography.com to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Washington Post to the Wichita Eagle. Content is instructionalized to meet students where they are, with interactive tools and analytics to take them where they want to go. Newsela has become an essential solution for schools and districts, with a presence in over 90% of U.S. K-12 schools. Newsela is the content platform for the connected classroom.